Review: NixOS 23.11
NixOS, as a general purpose distribution works quite well. On the surface it doesn't do anything particular remarkable - we install it using Calamares, it runs GNOME and KDE (and some other desktops), and ships with a fairly minimal desktop experience. It's not unlike other streamlined desktop and minimal desktop install options from other mainstream distributions. NixOS can work like just about any other desktop distribution as long as we don't mind turning to the command line to install new software.
With that said, under the surface NixOS becomes much more interesting. Its main purpose is showing off the Nix package manager and Nix is impressive. The Nix software provides many features above and beyond most other traditional Linux package managers, providing automated snapshots, multiple versions of the same package, atomic updates, and essentially a type of boot environment. It's also possible to both instantly rollback changes and jump forward through snapshots.
As I mentioned above, the real gem Nix offers is its central configuration file where we can install new software, enable services, and even manager user accounts by editing a single file and running a command. This makes Nix not just a package manager, but also a system manager. Plus it gives us the ability to set up a copy of our customized operating system on another computer by deploying the Nix configuration file to another machine and running a command. It's highly flexible and, though there is a learning curve, this makes deploying (or redeploying) our distribution virtually effortless.
In addition to all of this, NixOS is a rare gem in that I don't think I ran into any errors while I was using it. The distribution was stable, it worked well with my hardware, and I didn't run into a single issue while running it. I feel NixOS is well worth a try, especially if you're a system administrator and want to deploy (or maintain) identical distributions across multiple machines.